When you ask someone what their religion is, the chance that they will say "none" has increased dramatically in the past few decades. Religiosity used to be a defining characteristic of U.S. culture. Protestants were known for the word and avoiding statues; Catholics attended Sunday Mass and abstained from meat on Fridays; Jewish people were notable for their faithful observance of the Sabbath.  

Today, Exodus recounts God's self-description: "I am the Lord who brought you out of Egypt."  This tells us that Israel's God gets involved in human history by calling on people like Moses to carry out divine plans. Then we hear God's commandments, which were not really very extraordinary; most mirrored the ethics of civilizations of their time: No society condoned lying, stealing or abandoning the elderly.  

But Israel's Sabbath was unique. Imitating their God, Israelites consecrated one of every seven days for worship, family celebrations and leisure. The Sabbath affirmed that people are more important than work, that strong relationships with God and others outvalue any accomplishment and that everyone needs time for re-creation, for recentering themselves in relation to everything else. Sabbath became an approach to life sacramentalizing the people's time and leisure. The Sabbath enhanced the people's relationship with God and also intensified their shared identity.  The attitude of Sabbath honed Israel's appreciation of the sacredness that surrounded them and highlighted places and practices that sharpened their awareness of the presence of God and the meaning of their life.  

While the God of Israel could appear anywhere, the temple functioned as a focal point for prayer and other expressions of the peoples' relationship with God. It was a holy place. The day Jesus entered the temple he observed not faith, but sacrilege. This place of worship, the religious center for all God's people, looked like a bazaar — one in which distinctions between male and female, clergy and laity, wealthy and poor were on display and reinforced. 

Rather than being an inducement to prayer, sacrifice had become a business, supporting the money changers and merchants who made fortunes by selling supposed access to God. Operating as the opposite of what it was intended to be, the temple could impede people's experience of a merciful, loving God. In Jesus' eyes, the temple had become a blasphemy, the anti-reign of God.  

After evicting the religious retailers, Jesus made the famous statement, "Destroy this temple and in three days, I will raise it up again." John explains that "this temple" referred to Jesus himself, not an architectural wonder. As in his conversation with a woman at a well, that phrase taught that God's presence cannot be captured in structures — be they buildings, tabernacles or even particular practices. We discover God's presence like Moses did. He experienced a mystery that called him to an impossible vocation, a vocation that came to fruition through the help of the Holy Spirit. Jesus claimed that he definitively replaced the temple and sacrifice. He sacramentalized the presence of God through his loving relationships and all that flowed from them.  

When we say that God is love, we assert that God's presence is mediated in relationships. Institutions may facilitate our awareness of God's presence, but we encounter God in prayer and in the love among us that makes God's own love palpable in our world.  

When we say that we are Christians, we claim with St. Paul that we believe that God's greatest self-revelation came to us in Christ whose cross revealed that the foolish vulnerability of divine love expresses the greatest power in creation. The power of divine love is neither controlling nor coercive. God's love attracts and woos us. 

Jesus' vehemence in the temple sprang from the fact that people had distorted their faith and desecrated God's house. They offered a counterfeit relationship with God based on sacrifice over love. If the desecrators of the temple had been asked what their religion was, one honest answer would have been, "profit," and another would have been "power." The most cynical and honest might have said, "none."

Contemplating Jesus' fury in the temple calls us to take account of ourselves. What religion do we proclaim in our worship and our daily actions? Do we take advantage of holy times for re-creation that can permeate our week or have our Sabbaths slipped away, taking second (or third) place to work, profit, sports or any other activity that distracts us from taking the time to create ever-deeper relationships with God and neighbor? 

This third week of Lent calls us to re-evaluate our religious identity. If we ask not what we call our denomination, but what our behavior reveals about our real beliefs, what's the honest answer? How do we want to answer? 

What do you feel when someone says "God is testing you"? Really, doesn't it seem unfair for God to call us into a contest of wits? Knowing we'd never win, Jesus taught us to pray, "Do not put us to the test." But still, we hear stories that sound like God's testing.  

In an interesting combination of Scripture passages, the story of Abraham's test prepares us for contemplating Jesus' transfiguration. Genesis 22:1 says, "God put Abraham to the test." Marc Chagall, the Jewish mystic who conveyed theology through his art, portrays the "Sacrifice of Isaac" as a tragic tale that runs through history. Abraham and Isaac are the central characters, while the main scene is subtly repeated by depictions of the crucifixion and a ghetto scene recalling the Holocaust.  

Many Jewish theologians interpret the story of Abraham's test not as God's demand for sacrifice, but as an account of the call to metanoia and a divine declaration that the God of life would never require human sacrifice. In that light, we might understand the transfiguration as an invitation to the disciples to adjust their perspective.  

Mark situates the Transfiguration after the healing of a blind man, Peter's proclamation that Jesus was the Messiah and disciples' rejection of Jesus' teaching about the suffering to come. In that context, Jesus' resplendent appearance underlined the fact that he was not the messiah they were expecting. No potentate or conquering warrior who would oust the Roman occupiers, Jesus did not fill the role of the one they hoped for. He was far too powerless and vulnerable to match their concepts of God or a savior.  

On that mountain, the disciples saw Jesus conversing with Moses and Elijah, symbols of Israel's vocation and identity. The law defined the people of Israel as God's own. The prophets led them to know what being the people of God demanded of them at each moment. Moses and Elijah would have been dazzling enough, but in addition to being accompanied by those two giants, Jesus himself glowed with incomprehensible glory.  

Incomprehensible must be the word for this Sunday; it fits us, the disciples and Abraham. Isaiah, who carried out his ministry around 700 BCE, had reminded his people of God's proclamation, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways" (Isaiah 55:6-10). Both Abraham and the people of Jesus' day had a hard time accepting that. (Not to mention us!)  Abraham, in imitation of the religions surrounding him, wanted to please God by offering his all.  

In a culture that did not believe in eternal life, Isaac represented Abraham's only future beyond the grave. What Abraham didn't realize was that his notion of sacrifice smacked of manipulation; it was close to the Pelagianism St. Augustine would fight against (we can be good enough to earn salvation) and the practices Martin Luther would condemn as he insisted that salvation is a free gift of a loving God that can never be earned. God's undermining of sacrifice leads us to realize that the belief that we can earn God's favor through sacrifice of any kind actually impedes our reception of the love God offers, regardless of our moral performance.  

The disciples' inability to understand Jesus was different from Abraham. They weren't so much trying to earn God's favor as they wanted to set the course for how Jesus should carry out his mission — a course that would lead the world to see him as a shining success. Jesus' appearance in glory would have fit their plan perfectly had it not been preceded by his insistence that they would save their lives by losing them, and, even more dreadfully, that Jesus would be ashamed of anyone who acted ashamed of him in his vulnerability.  

When we think of the Transfiguration in isolation, it fits wonderfully into our ambitions for glory and success. We are on the winning team! When we read it as a confirmation of Jesus' teachings about serving, about being the least and giving fully of ourselves in trust, we begin to understand that the glory of God is an enigma, a promise of glory and fulfillment through self-effacement and even apparent failure.  

St. Paul asks us, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" The reality, as Chagall reminds us, is that many can be against us. That's when the test comes. If we can drop our attempts to earn our own salvation, our misgivings and incomprehension can be transformed into stages on the road leading us ever more profoundly into the mystery of God's unfathomable love. 

This test has no fixed answers. It's actually an invitation to the freedom that flows from trust that God will continue to lead us into mystery beyond our highest hopes and wildest dreams.